Variety's boffo boss looks in no danger of being ankled

There aren't many people better qualified to assess how to survive in the movie business than Peter Bart, editor-in-chief and vice-president of Variety, Hollywood's leading trade publication. 'You have to see yourself in different roles,' he says. 'You always have to polish your act. Flexibility is the key.'

It's a lesson that 75-year-old Bart has applied all his life, making him one of Hollywood's most enduring characters. In addition to being in charge at Variety for almost two decades, the soft-spoken Bart has been a studio vice-president, movie producer, newspaper journalist, novelist - and, most improbably, for the last five years a TV presenter. He is not, he says, likely to retire any time soon.

An Anglophile since he studied economics at the LSE in the 1950s, he was recently in London receiving a film industry award. But we met in New York on the set of Shootout, the discursive movie chat show he hosts with film producer Peter Guber.

Their interviewees on the day I visit include Sex and the City's Sarah Jessica Parker. The programme evidently brings Bart leads in the battle to stay ahead of his paper's chief rival, the Hollywood Reporter; when their interview is over, Parker promises him she'll give Variety first casting news for her new art-themed reality TV show.

Since its inception in 1904, Variety has been required reading for film industry players and those who aspire to make it in Tinseltown. Bart oversees the original weekly, which analyses industry trends and runs a comprehensive review section, Daily Variety, which breaks movie news, and its New York equivalent Daily Variety Gotham

The paper is renowned for its idiosyncratic vocabulary: in Variety parlance, westerns are 'oaters', musicals 'tuners' and teen-themed comedies 'zitcoms', while good performances are 'boffo' and movie executives are 'ankled' rather than 'sacked'. It also devised the word 'blockbuster'. 'A lot of those terms were invented by Variety staff in the 1920s and they've hung on through the decades,' Bart says. 'We have our own dictionary.'

The paper is currently owned by Reed Business Information, the magazine wing of Reed Elsevier. The Anglo-Dutch publisher put the whole division up for sale in February, attracting several suitors, but no deal has been signed (or, as Variety would say, 'inked') yet.

Asked what attracted him back to journalism (he started out as a reporter on the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times), Bart sounds like a studio head extolling the comeback of a superhero: 'Variety was beginning to lose its momentum in 1989. It was an opportunity to re-invent this great franchise.' It was loss-making when he arrived, but now turns a tidy profit.

As with Hollywood, in the last 20 years Variety's outlook has become more international. But can it continue to thrive in an age where movie buffs increasingly prefer to get their fix online? 'We used to more own the beat,' Bart concedes, predicting a bleak future for consumer film magazines, as opposed to trade publications. 'But so many of the blogs are just gossip. They don't check their facts, they just run whatever anybody tells them.' He accepts, though, that Variety broke the embargo on reviews for the recently released Iron Man in order to outscoop the online forums.

Bart developed much of his film-making and critical sensibilities during his time as a film executive. He began at Paramount, spending much of the late Sixties and early Seventies in London at a time when Hollywood investment in UK films was at its peak. Among the films he developed was The Italian Job ('we were so enthusiastic about it that we never succeeded in figuring out how it should end', he says of its cliffhanging climax). Variety runs a weekly UK film column but Bart says of British cinema: 'There was such an energy [in the Sixties], and a sense that if you had a great idea you could get it made. It doesn't have the rhythm and the spontaneity that existed then.'

As deputy to iconic Paramount head Robert Evans, Bart helped develop The Godfather. 'I fought for Francis Ford Coppola and then, when he was going to be fired, I fought to retain him,' he says. 'Now he's very much got into his own head. He's said to me that he feels that I ruined his career by drafting him to The Godfather because I made him a commercial director.'

Bart left Paramount to run his own company, Lorimar, before becoming senior vice-president of MGM-UA during the Eighties. But he doesn't miss film-making: 'Hollywood has become very corporate. It's a shame to see the corporate mentality that dominant. When I was involved it was much more interesting because you didn't have to worry about huge budgets.' He's not entirely comfortable with the explosive growth of celebrity either, lamenting: 'There's no privacy anymore. All these folks are guarded. You saw Sarah Jessica Parker turned up with a posse of eight or nine people.'

In Hollywood, Bart's frankness, typified by his weekly Variety column, is legendary. 'Peter has the ability to be spunky and affable, sometimes at the same time,' says Shootout co-host Guber. That has occasionally meant a bumpy ride: he was suspended for 21 days in 2001 for allegedly making sexist and racist remarks in an LA magazine profile before being reinstated. He describes the incident as 'not true' and the suspension as a 'formality', adding, 'If you're in any way in the news, people take shots at you.'

Spoken like a true Hollywood star.

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